Lightroom Tip – Resetting Your Presets

What better way to start off a Friday on a holiday weekend (here in the US at least) than with a Lightroom tip OK, so have you ever ruined the Lightroom default presets or deleted one of them all together or just done something plain bad to them? Now you can’t get it back to the way it used to be right? Well, if you go to Lightroom’s preferences dialog by clicking on the Lightroom menu on Mac (Edit menu on PC), you’ll see a Presets tab. Go ahead and click on it. You’ll get something that looks like this window here:

The bottom of the dialog shows a way to reset all of Lightroom’s presets. But not just all of them in one full swoop. The cool part is that you can reset any one area you want by clicking on the button. So if I just want to get back to my original Export presets then I just click that button instead of resetting all presets in Lightroom. Plus, as a side tip, it’s always a cool way to find your presets if you’re not sure where Lightroom keeps them. There’s a button right in the middle that will show you where they are.

Matt is the Vice President of Photography for onOne Software and a Tampa-based photographer. He's a best selling author of over 20 books and teaches Lightroom and Photoshop at seminars and conferences around the world.

4 Comments

Mike Bresnen

August 8, 2012

Hey Scott,
I have a question, not sure if this is the right place. I just bought a new Mac I want to install LR and Ps. The Mac I have came with Lion but has a free download to upgrade to Mountain Lion. My question is this ( kind of long, but here goes) the installation discs I have are for LR3 and Ps5. I want to install them and then download the upgrades to LR4 and Ps6. Also I will be installing the Nik collection. I see a lot of people on forums talking about problems with compatibility of the different programs and systems. I am no computer guy by any means. I want to know if there is a certain order that is best for installation to avoid problems. Also should I wait on Mountain Lion in case there are bugs?
On a side note I really like your books. You write in a way that makes things understandable,especially for a guy not good with computers like me.

Hey Matt! Thanks for the tip. I was wondering if you could answer a LR question regarding keywords. Is there a way to have one master keyword list for all Catalogs?

I recently split up my one catalog into 4 different ones (Nature, Portraits, Travel, and Work). However, when reorganized the keywords in my Nature catalog, and then headed over to my Portraits catalog, I noticed that it didn’t update. Is there a way to either have one master keyword list, or have them all sync together?

Miguel,
When I have the keywords I want for several Catalogs I export the list. This becomes my master. Then Import the Master list into each Catalog. The Negative is if I make changes in one catalog which needs also to be across all catalogs I either have to re-export / import or make the same change in each catlg manually. At least this is faster than manually entering all keywords into each catlg.